Vicente Sanchez and John Lara are two men with strikingly similar backgrounds who ended up leading vastly different lives.

Each man points to a defining feature in his unfolding destiny: Early education — either its presence or absence.

Both now 41, they grew up in derelict housing projects in San Antonio, sons of single mothers who had little in the way of education, personal resources or job prospects.

But Sanchez, enrolled as a toddler in a local program that provided family support and placed him in an early childhood classroom, went on to thrive. Now in graduate school, he's on track to excel even more in a career he loves.

Lara didn't benefit from such intervention.

No one would argue that lack of early education was the sole influence shaping anyone's life — personal strengths and weaknesses factor in, as do other extenuating circumstances. But Lara thinks being held back in kindergarten was a blow at the outset. He has spent the past decade climbing out from a past that includes a long criminal record and stints behind bars.

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On Nov. 6, voters will cast their ballots on Pre-K 4 SA, an initiative that calls for a 1/8th-cent sales tax increase that would bring full-day pre-kindergarten to thousands of the city's 4-year-olds.

For months, those on opposite sides have offered their arguments.

The city has no business getting involved in early education, opponents say. Such programs already exist, and those that do exist aren't effective, others say. The pre-K initiative won't reach all children. Also: It's a parent's job to see that children are ready for kindergarten.

Proponents say the program is sorely needed, and that ensuring school-readiness will help children escape the generational cycles of poverty and underachievement that keeps many San Antonians stuck in low-wage jobs. As more children succeed, from primary grades to college, the city as a whole will gain, they say.

Average annual pay in Bexar County trails the nation, the state and Texas' three other large metro areas. In 2011, more than 47 percent of Bexar County workers made $35,000 a year or less. That same year, 24.4 percent had a high school diploma or equivalent, also below the state and national averages.

“How well a local economy can grow and develop depends largely on how educated and skilled the workforce is,” said Steve Nivin, chief economist at the SÁBER Research Institute, a local think-tank that focuses on economic issues. “When businesses are looking to relocate, the key factor is whether or not there's a skilled work force. If they can't find skilled labor, they can't be here. That's just a fact.”

Studies confirm the key role pre-kindergarten plays in growing an educated work force, Nivin said. It partly comes down to brain science, said Ellen Marshall, chairwoman of the early childhood studies department at San Antonio College.

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“Research shows that in the first five years of life, there's more brain development than at any other time,” she said. “Those neural connections build the architecture of the brain you have later in life, so it's vitally important children have them. And research shows those connections come from interactions with others.”

Sanchez's and Lara's stories would seem to underscore the experts' words.

But each man avows that the help he received, or didn't receive, as a young child entering the school system set him inexorably on a path toward success or struggle.

Unexpected outcome

Vicente Sanchez said he still has to pinch himself when he looks around at his neighbors' manicured lawns in his North Side subdivision, their fine brick homes, their shiny, late-model cars.

“I never thought I'd be living in a place like this,” said Sanchez.

It's a far cry from where he started out, at a housing project where he and his four siblings begged outside the nearby McDonald's when the beans and rice ran out along with his mother's food stamps.

“I remember being hungry,” Sanchez said. “There would be mold on the bread and my mom would say, 'Just scrape it off, it's OK.'”

His mother, Elida Cruz Galindo, was raised in the same projects, one of 11 children. Her own mother left school in the second grade to work in the cotton fields of Lockhart. Her father, from Mexico, couldn't read or write and worked in construction.

Galindo, 60, said her father was an alcoholic who beat her mother. He abandoned the family when she was 10. After that, the family subsisted on welfare and food stamps.

“Education was never stressed to us at home,” she recalled. “We were just trying to survive.”

She ran away from home at 14, dropping out of the seventh grade. She divorced the father of her first child when she was three months pregnant. Two more children were born out-of-wedlock. By the time Galindo was 18, she had three children and was living as her mother did, on the public dole. Then, in 1973 there came a knock on her door.

Galindo ignored it. The next week, the knock came again. She ignored it. The third time, she opened her door.

“It was these people from a program called Avance,” she said. “They said they wanted me to attend these classes. They asked me, 'What do you want to be in life?' I said, 'A teacher or a nurse.'”

Avance uses parenting classes and other services to inculcate in clients a sense of hope and self-worth they then transmit to their children. Pre-K 4 SA will offer similar services targeting parental involvement, said Rebecca Flores, the city's education policy administrator.

Galindo attended parenting classes and earned her GED through Avance. She went on to become a licensed vocational nurse, a job she held 37 years. “Avance was the turning point for my family,” said Galindo, who divorced the father of her last two children.

While she pursued her goals, Sanchez, then 2, and his siblings were placed in the program's early childhood education classes, where they learned concepts often taken for granted in middle-class homes: colors, numbers, the ABCs.

Through a separate program, he and his siblings then attended Head Start, a federally funded early education program for 3- to 5-year-olds from low-income families, and then kindergarten in the Edgewood school district.

It was a start that stood him well. Sanchez succeeded in high school, earning his diploma in 1990. But he wasn't done.

“My mother told me all along I was going to college,” he said.

Sanchez couldn't afford tuition, so he worked for a time before entering the U.S. Navy, where he served for four years overseas as a jet engine mechanic. He returned to San Antonio in 2004 and waited tables while earning an associate's degree at San Antonio College.

In 2008, he received a bachelor's degree in Mexican-American Studies from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Prodded by a professor, he enrolled in graduate school and is on track to receive a master's in community counseling from UTSA in May.

Working with foster parents at the San Antonio Children's Shelter, his first professional job, Sanchez found his true calling: social services. In 2010, he became coordinator of an Avance parent-child education program targeted at fathers.

“They have problems that reminded me of my mom when we were growing up,” he said. “For me, this is not just a job, it's a passion.”

All five of Sanchez' siblings graduated from high school and have good-paying jobs.

“We're all Avance babies,” he said.

Sanchez plans to pursue a second master's degree in licensed professional counseling and dreams of one day running his own nonprofit.

It was the foundation he got through Avance that made all the difference in his life, he said.

“Most of my friends are in prison or dead, and we all came from same background,” he said.

Background

Lara also grew up in the projects, raised by a single mom with few resources.

Mother Diana Lara, one of eight siblings, was herself raised by a single mother, who worked as a waitress. She, in turn, was raised by a seamstress from Mexico who spoke no English. Lara's grandfather, also from Mexico, spoke no English and was a baker.

Diana said her father was an abusive alcoholic with no high school degree who sold fish from a truck. He left the family when she was 7. She, too, grew up in the projects on public assistance.

Diana dropped out of high school at 14, when she became pregnant. By the time she was 19, she had three sons and was on her own, fleeing her husband, who she said beat her.

She got a job as a cashier at a downtown five-and-dime store, where she made $2.45 an hour. She never read to her children when they were little or put them in pre-kindergarten or even day care, because she didn't know they existed.

“I know this is no excuse, but I was just exhausted all the time,” she said. “Nobody ever read to me, so I didn't know you were supposed to do that.”

John Lara had to repeat kindergarten because he couldn't master the simple lessons.

“I remember feeling so dumb,” he recalled. “Why could all the other kids raise their hands and answer the teacher's questions, and I couldn't? Even all these years later, it still hurts.”

Diana did her best to instill manners and values in her children, she said. She got cable TV so her sons could watch the Disney Channel, wholesome fare, while she was at work and they were home alone.

After kindergarten, John Lara caught up with his classmates, sometimes even making top grades. But residue of hurt and defiance lingered, and the unsavory lures in his downtrodden neighborhood proved irresistible: At 13, he was sent to state school for fighting and stealing cars.

By 17, with multiple arrests already on his record, Lara dropped out of high school. He then began a long career of nonviolent crime — mostly auto theft and burglary — and stints in jail. He earned a GED behind bars and several vocational certificates.

His longest sentence was eight years in prison, where one day a warden — tired of his constant fighting with other inmates — asked him: What can I do to keep you out of trouble?

“I said to him, 'Put me in school,'” Lara said. “I don't know why I said that. It was like God touched me or something. School was the best thing that ever happened to me. It helped me change, become a different man.”

Lara took college prep courses behind bars that focused on reading and writing essays. He got out of prison in 1999, when he was 28, and hasn't committed another criminal offense since, he said. He finally got off parole in 2008.

Today he works as a car mechanic and in car repossession. He tries his best to instill the importance of education in his young nephew and niece, who are being raised by Diana. He does the same for one of his daughters, 21, who attends San Antonio College and plans to transfer to Texas A&M.

Support that starts early, he said, is the key to breaking the cycle.

“I wanted a different life and education is what did it,” he said. “I realized I was living wrong.”